Criticism of ‘Nostalgia’, beautiful Italian suffering

Being a crime story about the passage of time with an intimate depth and a feeling of loneliness that freezes your soul and that we haven’t seen in the genre since ‘Once upon a time in America’, by Sergio Leone, ‘Nostalgia’ is something more than the return of a prodigal son to a city that has not changed and will never change or the reunion of two friends today on both sides of the law (can there be more of a black series than this? If we add a priest who knew as children we would have a Warner gangster melodrama with Cagney, Bogart and Tracy).

Mario Martone’s film is a chronicle of pain to stop loving someone: a mother, a comrade, a city, a country or oneself. It is the ‘I will always love you’ that Roberto Rossellini also shot in Naples in 1954 while her marriage to Ingrid Bergman was fading like that of her and George Sanders in fiction. A ghostly walk through a present as or more mute than those flashes of yesterday to which the director gives the format of old images in Super 8the nostalgic material of which death is made.

For those nostalgic for an Italian cinema capable of making suffering beautiful

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DATA SHEET

Address: Mario Martino Distribution: Pierfrancesco Favino, Francesco Di Leva, Tommaso Ragno, Aurora Quattrocchi Country: Italy Year: 2022 Release date: 9–12-2022 Gender: Drama Script: Ippolita Di Majo, Mario Martone Duration: 117 min.

Synopsis: After 40 years of absence, Felice Lasco returns from Egypt to his hometown: Naples. There he rediscovers the places, the codes of the city and a past that corrodes him.